ARE YOU GLAD TO BE IN America?

ARE YOU GLAD TO BE IN America? is a transatlantic power trio built around the electric guitar, bass and drums — and around the idea that improvisation can be both raw and deeply musical.

At the center is Simone Magioncalda, a young guitar player from Genova, Italy, born in 2006. On bass is Kenneth Jimenez, originally from Costa Rica and now based in New York City. The drums are played by Alfred Vogel, the Austrian drummer, percussionist and producer born in Vorarlberg in 1972. The trio takes its name and its spirit from James “Blood” Ulmer’s seminal Are You Glad to Be in America? — the 1980 album where Ulmer brought together electric guitar, funk, free jazz, rock and harmolodic thinking in a music that was simultaneously fierce, strange and intensely physical.

But the three are not a tribute band: The music of ARE YOU GLAD TO BE IN AMERICA? uses Ulmer’s vocabulary as a point of departure: distorted guitar, elastic bass, fractured rhythms, deep grooves, sudden shifts, repetition, noise and free improvisation. The three musicians leave plenty of space for one another, treating the trio less as guitar-with-rhythm-section and more as a single, constantly mutating organism.